Despite being personally invited to Richard Gage’s presentation in Auckland in 2009 and having correspondence with Auckland 911 truth activists and a face to face meeting (thanks to Martin and Glenis), Professor Charles Clifton, associate professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Auckland, denies the existence of ae911truth supporters in New Zealand. Professor Clifton still clings to his theory regarding the collapse of the World Trade Centre where he essentially believes that the the plane destroyed a large chunk of the core immediately at impact which severely weakened the rest of the structure. See his study on the collapse of the twin towers here.

No, they are not. Richard Gage came to New Zealand for a speaking tour. I couldn’t go to his presentation due to other commitments but he got very little publicity, little credit and not much following. As far as I am aware there is not a serious group of WTC conspiracy theorists in New Zealand.

We have responded with the following comment that has not been displayed at the Italian debunking website.

Did Richard Gage come to New Zealand and speak to hundreds of people in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland (as Charles Clifton admits) or did he not?

If Richard Gage actually came to New Zealand in 2009, who paid the thousands of dollars it would have taken to get him here, print 10,000 flyers, organise articles in local papers and the interviews on TVNZ and Radio NZ? Such was the interest in Mr Gage’s presentation that in November 2009 over 600 people attended the exhibition at the National Museum in Wellington with another 100 turned away due to lack of room. The Auckland presentation organised by Auckland activists at short notice after the Wellington presentation attracted 200. Mr Gage’s New Zealand tour was subsequently written about in articles in the Listener, Architecture Magazine, discussed on Radio New Zealand’s afternoon panel and talked about on science and political blogs.

Who runs and financially supports the NZ911Truth website and has distributed many thousands of DVDs and flyers regularly every month on the streets of Wellington since 2008? Who organizes the annual 911 exhibitions in Wellington and Rotorua which attract growing numbers every year?

Who paid for the recent Rethink911 posters displayed on the streets near the Radio New Zealand and Dominion Post newspaper offices in central Wellington? Who invited Mr Clifton to the Auckland presentation and has corresponded with him since? In addition to a good number of activists throughout New Zealand there are also hundreds of New Zealanders who have signed ae911truth’s petition calling for a new, genuine 911 investigation.

We have given up long ago on trying to disabuse Charles Clifton of his Magical Thinking on 911. However, we must refute his false assertion – a statement he knows to be false – where he denies that New Zealanders who support the work of ae911truth actually exist. He has had enough contact with us and has sufficient knowledge of our activities to know that he is making a false statement.

Yesterday Prime Minister John Key justified the extrajudicial killing of a New Zealander in a US drone strike in Yemen with a few cynical, callous words at a stand-up press conference.

Key said he’d been briefed by our spy agencies that apparently this New Zealander was a terrorist who went to a terrorist training camp in Yemen and that Key thought these types of drone strikes were justified when dealing with “these types of people.

I’ve no idea what this murdered New Zealander was doing in Yemen – and I’m certain neither does John Key. The US National Security Agency has fed selective information about the strike to our GCSB which has fed selective information to the Prime Minister who has fed selective information to the hapless public of New Zealand.

Other media reports at the time of the drone strike in August 2013 said it took out “suspected al-Qaida operatives”. Who would know? In fact the majority of people killed in US drone strikes have been civilians.

A Human Rights Watch report released last year examined six such strikes in Yemen carried out between 2009–2013 and found that of the 82 people killed, at least 57 were civilians. Was this New Zealander just more collateral damage? We don’t know and we can’t expect the government or our spy agencies to tell us.

The HRW report also concluded that the drone strikes it examined “may have violated the laws of war because the individual attacked was not a lawful military target or the attack caused disproportionate civilian harm.”

All we do know for sure is that this New Zealander never got charged, never got a trial but that somewhere in the US a decision was made for the mass assassination of a group he was with – the kind of murderous act which has been condemned by governments and human rights groups around the world.

Here are a few critical questions for our Prime Minister.
•What evidence is there this New Zealander was a “terrorist” or was the label added after his death to justify the crime?
•How long had the GCSB been spying on him?
•Why was he allowed to travel overseas when other New Zealanders wanting to go overseas to fight in places like Syria for example have had their passports seized?
•What was he doing when he was killed?
•Why did the US launch a drone strike against him?
•If there was evidence of terrorist activity why was he not simply arrested when he returned to New Zealand or entered a third country?
•Was New Zealand informed by the US before they attacked and killed this kiwi citizen?
•If so what was the response of our spy agencies and their political master John Key?
•If New Zealand was not informed then why not?
•In aligning this country in support for US drone strikes what additional terrorist threat does that expose New Zealanders to?
•Why did the government not make the information about the killing public at the time when it occurred?
•Would the government ever have made this public if the information has not leaked out?

In typically cynical fashion Key is using this incident to bolster support for the GCSB and the massive increase in the power it was given last year to spy on us. He says it shows why we need the GCSB to spy on New Zealanders.

No it doesn’t My Key – it shows why the GCSB must be closed and why New Zealand must develop an independent foreign policy rather than one which aligns to deadly US foreign policy and increases the risk of terrorist attacks on New Zealanders.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden says the United States’ spy agency has helped find or create loopholes in New Zealand law to enable widespread spying.

In testimony to the European Parliament, the exiled former NSA worker said the agency’s Foreign Affairs Division put pressure on other countries to change laws to create legal gaps through which mass surveillance could be carried out.

A Customs officer at Auckland International Airport took law graduate Sam Blackman’s two smartphones, iPad, an external hard drive and laptop – and demanded his passwords.

Mr Blackman, 27, who was breaking up travelling with his journalist fiance Imogen Crispe for a month back in New Zealand for Christmas, was initially given no reason why the gear was taken.

The only possibility of why it occurred was his attendance – and tweeting – of a London meeting on mass surveillance sparked by the Snowden revelations, he said.

However, a Customs official has since told him they were searching everything for objectionable material under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993.

Mr Blackman said he did not have anything of that nature and could not understand why he had been targeted.

Mr Blackman arrived in Auckland at 5.30am on a flight from Heathrow, travelling through San Francisco.

He declared loose-leaf tea he was carrying as he came through Customs and believed that was responsible for the extensive bag search to which he was subjected.

“He said ‘we’re not worried about the tea’,” Mr Blackman said of the Customs’ official.

The official then returned to going through the bag, pulling out electronic equipment as he did so. “We’re going to have to detain this,” Mr Blackman said he was told. “We’re going to have to send this to a forensic investigator.”

Mr Blackman said when he pulled a phone out of his pocket, the official also took that, refusing permission for him to call his parents who were waiting in the arrival lounge.

He said he was also told to provide passwords for the equipment. “That is a real invasion of privacy.”

One of the phones had no password but required a design to be traced on the screen. The official was unconcerned and said the forensic team would defeat security to access the device, Mr Blackman claimed.

He said he asked why the items were being confiscated and the official refused to say – or to say how long the items would be kept.

Earlier, Mr Blackman said he thought it may have occurred because of his attendance at the London meeting on mass surveillance.

In November, Mr Blackman and Ms Crispe attended a meeting at the Royal Institute of British Architects attended by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, MPs from across Europe, and spokespeople from groups opposing spying.

A Customs’ spokeswoman refused to discuss Mr Blackman’s case. She said passengers considered “high risk”received attention at the airport. She also said Customs officials were required to have “reasonable cause”to believe an offence had been committed.

“Information or data may be used as evidence of an offence or may be a prohibited item such as objectionable images.”

TechLiberty director Thomas Beagle said the seizure of phones and laptops was a “major interference in your life”in the modern world.

He said Customs law had a pre-digital focus which, when applied to the technical age, did not take into account the amount of personal information or the frequency of use.

“What does this mean for other people? You really have to consider what you take over the border.”

Mr Beagle said his understanding of the law was that travellers did not have to surrender their passwords.

However, he said it meant it was likely the device of interest would then not be allowed into the country.

National Radio is widely regarded by intelligent, educated citizens as a treasure, to be protected at all costs against cheap commercialization. Coverage of contentious topics such as global warming by radio talkback hosts is invariably slanted and superficial, to the point where it is a moot question as to whether it constitutes journalism at all.

It was therefore a great disappointment that the interview you conducted with Dr. Simon Pollard on Wednesday November 20th fell far short of the high journalistic standards one has come to expect of National Radio.

The interview was entitled “Science with Simon Pollard”, but where was the science? As a retired science teacher I would have expected some presentation of evidence for the assertions made. In that way, listeners could use their brains to come to their own conclusions — rather than have their thinking done for them — as is so often the case in the corporately owned mass media.

But no. Dr. Pollard made a number of statements that positively invited cross-examination, but instead you uncritically agreed with him. Although Dr. Pollard’s comments related mainly to the Kennedy assassination, he did make a number of references to 911 — about which I know quite a lot. The tone of his comments was disparaging and condescending, and to those of us who have researched 911 in depth, they were insulting.

At this stage, I hope it is simply the case that you have been guilty of nothing more than uncritically accepting the explanation put out by the corporate media. In this respect, I was taken in too, until my son showed me his copy of The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin. The Foreword caught my attention because it was by Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University. It seemed to me that the book he was endorsing was at least worth a second look, so I began to read. In book, Prof. Griffin presents detailed evidence that the official explanation for the events of 911 cannot be true. His nine later books add even more evidence, all of it in the public domain and fully referenced.

Professor Griffin is but one of a large number of academics and other professionals round the world, who have called for a new and independent inquiry (Phillip Zelikow, who ran the 911 Commission Inquiry, was closely linked to the White House). I’m sure you’d agree that people in such high positions are unlikely to be crackpots. Therefore, we should at least pay attention to what they have to say, rather than uncritically accepting put-downs by an arachnologist. In the spirit of the scientific method, we should study the evidence for ourselves.

In dismissing those who are skeptical of the official explanation for 911, Dr. Pollard used the put-down term ‘conspiracy theorist’, a term that was first introduced into the public lexicon by the CIA after doubts were raised about the Warren Commission Report into the Kennedy assassination.

A democracy can only survive if its citizens are informed and, above all, free to question government accounts of events. A fundamental prerequisite for this is the existence of untrammelled, independent media. For National Radio to fulfill this requirement, intelligent listeners who present reasoned argument against orthodoxy should not be dismissed without giving them an opportunity to present evidence in support of their concerns.

There is another aspect to this, which may not have occurred to you. There are people in the National and Act parties who are itching to privatize National Radio. This would be a tragedy, for we would then have descended to the same level as characterizes commercial broadcasting in the United States. If the extinction of quality, independent radio does loom, we can be sure that the strongest argument will come from those who fear that the treatment of political issues will be limited to sound bites by ‘talking heads’. As Noam Chomsky famously said:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum”.

I hope that your interview with Simon Pollard is not an indication that we have already arrived at such a state of affairs without the assistance of the National Government.

The leader of New Zealand’s fastest-rising political party, Colin Craig, says he’s not sure man walked on the moon and hasn’t even ruled out conspiracy theories about the 2011 terrorist attacks in the United States.

On a radio show this morning, Mr Craig says he doesn’t have time to look into these matters and it’s not a priority for him – his priorities are making sure New Zealanders have jobs, houses and can succeed.

Less than a year out from a general election, and with National’s coalition partners ACT and United Future having their own issues, the Conservatives are being touted as a potential coalition partner for Prime Minister John Key’s party.

Simon Pollard is Adjunct Professor in Science Communication at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. He is a specialist on spiders, and previously he was Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at Canterbury Museum. He is an award-winning natural history photographer and writer. He is an advisor, scriptwriter and presenter of a natural history documentaries, including the BBC series Planet Earth.

On Wednesday 20th November he was interviewed about ‘conspiracy theories’ on New Zealand National Radio programme Nine-to-Noon by Kathryn Ryan under the title: “Science with Simon Pollard”.

An Open Letter to Simon Pollard

by Martin Hanson, retired science teacher

Dr Pollard,

Following your interview with Kathryn Ryan on Nine-to-Noon, I wrote to you to express my disappointment at your casual dismissal of those people who do not believe that The 911 Commission Report is a truthful account of what happened in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th 2001. Your unwillingness to reply itself constitutes a kind of reply – that you are unwilling to engage in an academic debate.

Insouciant dismissal of serious academic matters may satisfy some Nine-to-Noon listeners, but for an increasingly skeptical and thoughtful public, it won’t wash. Even an arachnologist must know that gravity acts strictly downward! The photo of the collapse of Tower 1 in the World Trade Center proves that powerful lateral forces were at work in the ‘collapse’ of the towers. Given that over 100 eye-witnesses testified to explosions on that day, your silence speaks eloquently for your position on the issue.

Although some conspiracy theories are just plain silly, it’s important to point out that a conspiracy is nothing more than a process in which two or more people get together in secret to achieve an illegal or immoral end. Conspiracies are actually very common, but in popular use the term ‘conspiracy theory’ has come to take on a strongly pejorative connotation. The term was deliberately introduced into the popular lexicon by the CIA in an attempt to counter suggestions that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone but was part of a larger conspiracy. Since then, and especially after 911, it has been systematically used by the media as a put-down to stifle any consideration of evidence.

Having said that, I have to agree with you that the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ is justifiably disparaging. I have personal knowledge of several individuals who seem to have a deep psychological need to distrust authority and consequently look for conspiracies even when they do not exist.

One who has achieved internet fame is Alex Jones who, in proclaiming that Global Warming is a conspiracy, makes the very idea of ‘conspiracy’ disreputable in the public mind. When such scientific ignoramuses also happen to believe that 911 was an ‘inside job’, it is only too easy to discredit the latter views by tainting them by association with the former.

The Heartland Institute used this tactic by putting up a billboard in Chicago featuring Ted Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber. Alongside Kaczynski’s mugshot were the words: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” The intention was to put up similar billboards featuring Charles Manson and Fidel Castro, both of whom may have had related beliefs, but the scheme was cancelled before it could get airborne.

As you know, science is an activity of organized inquiry into natural phenomena, in which observations provoke questions, which lead to hypotheses that can be tested by experiment and further observation.

Beliefs that are not accessible to observation and experiment do not fall within the purview of science. Bertrand Russell famously said that he couldn’t prove that there wasn’t a teapot going round the sun between the orbits of Earth and Mars, but no sane person would use this as an argument for its existence.

Unlike Russell’s celestial teapot, the evidence surrounding the events of 911 is an embarrassment of riches, even for the most square-eyed troglodyte whose window on the world is limited to Fox News or The Sun newspaper. The trouble is, the most significant news items appeared for only a very short time after 911 and were soon buried and forgotten by the vast majority of the public.

The media have gone to great lengths to exclude from the public consciousness any evidence that is inconsistent with the official account. Truckloads of evidence have been published in many documentaries and books (I have over 25 on my own shelves). Almost none of these have been mentioned, let alone reviewed, by the media —except to condemn without mentioning any of the evidence they adduce. Amongst the most powerful are The New Pearl Harbor, and nine other books by Professor David Ray Griffin.

I realize that you might well say that thousands of nutty books have been published on innumerable subjects, so the credibility of a case can’t be measured by the number of books written about it. You’d be right, but what you can’t dismiss as conspiracy fantasy is the fact that literally thousands of professors and other academics and professional people round the world have called for a new and genuinely independent inquiry. There are now over a dozen organizations calling for such an inquiry, for example:

In addition to these organizations and their thousands of supporters, a number of highly distinguished individuals with impeccable intellectual credentials have publicly doubted the official story. To mention just a few:

Richard Falk, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Princeton University

Paul Craig Roberts, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

Ferdinando Imposimato, honorary President of the Supreme Court of Italy, and former Senior Investigative Judge, Italy.

I think you’d agree that it is highly unlikely that people in such high positions are crackpots. Therefore, we should at least pay attention to what they have to say, rather than uncritically accepting media put-downs. In the spirit of the scientific method, we should study the evidence for ourselves.

The trouble is that the evidence is so mountainous that I must limit myself to listing the topics, leaving it to you to look into the details. So, here they are:

1. Video evidence, for example the video analysis of collapse of the WTC towers, by physicist David Chandler:

2. Planted Evidence The most egregious (and laughable) of numerous examples: ABC News and the Associated Press reported that the virtually undamaged passport of hijacker Satam Al Suqami was found a few blocks from the WTC.

3. Destruction and Confiscation of Evidence

Immediately after 911 nearly all the steel was hurriedly exported to Asia, thus preventing forensic examination of the steelwork. Thus the biggest crime in U.S. history was made an exception to the Federal law that forbids interference with a crime scene.

Immediately after the Pentagon attack, Federal agents removed many small fragments from the lawn in front of the Pentagon, and later the lawn was covered with sand.

4. Withholding of Evidence

After 911, the New York Fire Department interviewed firefighters, paramedics and other first responders. Of the 503 interviewees, 118 reported hearing or seeing explosions prior to and during the collapse of the Twin Towers. These ‘oral histories’ were suppressed by the New York authorities until forced by court action to release them.

Though the Pentagon is the most heavily surveilled building in the whole of the United States, only 5 frames of a video camera were released – despite the presence of dozens of (reportedly 83) video cameras.

5. Almost complete absence of Aircraft wreckage at both the Pentagon (Flight 77) and Shanksville (Flight 93) crash sites –in contrast to all other terrestrial aircraft sites, where bodies, aircraft wreckage, luggage, etc are the norm (though an unsinged Shia bandana was reportedly found!).

6. Guilty Behaviour by the White House.

The Bush Administration was deeply unwilling to hold an inquiry into the biggest crime in American history, and only after intense pressure (and over 400 days after the event) did they agree. And then, they allotted initially only $3 million (in contrast to the $50 million given to the Challenger Inquiry).

After it was set up, the 911 Commission was overseen by Phillip Zelikow, who had been a close colleague of Condoleezza Rice, and was thus for all practical purposes a White House insider. Zelikow decided what witnesses would be heard and what would be in the Report.

As documented in Philip Shenon’s book The Commission, Zelikow had written the outline of the Report before the hearings began, and during the hearings he was in telephone contact with Carl Rove, Senior Adviser and Assistant to President Bush). So much for the ‘independence’ of the 911 Commission of Inquiry!

When Bush and Cheney were interviewed by the Commission, they did not appear under oath, meaning that they did not have to tell the truth.

Much of the evidence provided by CIA interrogation of al-Qaida suspects was based on torture. Commissioners were not allowed to interview suspects, or even their CIA interrogators. Taped evidence of interrogations had been destroyed.

‘Dancing Israelis’ The New York Times reported that five men had set up video cameras prior to the New York attack and had filmed the collapse of the towers. http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/fiveisraelis.html Later, these men were interviewed on Israeli television and said that they were there to ‘document’ the event.

Rudi Guliani, Mayor of New York at the time of the attacks, said in TV interview that the Twin Towers were likely to collapse. In view of the fact that no steel-framed building had collapsed due to fire anywhere in the world, this seemed like foreknowledge.

8. Prior examples of false flag operations

Those who baulk at the suggestion that elements within a ‘democratic’ government could organize attacks on its own people to provide the excuse to attack another country need look no further than ‘Operation Northwoods’, details of which were later de-classified. Operation Northwoods was a plan put forward by General Lemnitzer and other military top brass in 1962. The proposal involved a series of ‘false flag’ operations in which U.S. citizens would have been killed in simulated terrorist attacks to provide justification to invade Cuba. President Kennedy rejected the proposal. ‘Operation Northwoods’ is but one of many historical examples of false flag operations, the best-known being the Reichstag Fire, started by the Nazis and blamed on the communists in order to justify the passing of the Enabling Act that destroyed any freedoms under the old Weimar Republic. The passing of the ‘Patriot Act’ shortly after 911 was an uncanny parallel. The Patriot Act effectively shredded many citizens’ rights previously guaranteed under the Constitution. As Mark Twain said, “history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.

A democracy can only survive if its citizens are informed and free to question their government, for which a fundamental prerequisite is the existence of untrammeled, independent media. If New Zealand democracy has friends like you and Radio New Zealand, who needs enemies?

5:30 AM Friday Aug 23, 2013
There are many reasons for concern about the GCSB Bill that has just passed into law, but one we might not have expected is the extent to which the Prime Minister seems unaware of its true implications.

It must surely have come as a shock, even to his supporters, that John Key seems not to understand some of the basic principles of democratic government. In particular, he seemed to see no distinction between his own personal assurances and the law of the land.

The great principle of English common law is that no man, “be ye ever so high”, is above the law. The great Chief Justice Edmund Coke would have made short shrift of any pretension that a mere politician could decide what was and was not the law by his mere say-so.

Yet that is what our Prime Minister apparently presumes to do. In assurances given in a television interview, he asked citizens to accept his word as to his intentions concerning the new power to intercept our communications that the security service he heads was about to have conferred upon it.